Michelle Nunn’s Hoopaganza

I don’t know if it reflects some sort of intense public interest in the Atlanta Hawks’ playoff bid, but the Senate campaign of Michelle Nunn (note: I’ve known Michelle for many years, and used to work for her father) seems to have succumbed to a major basketball jones. Check out this unusual TV ad:

I’m reasonably sure that at the height of his political fame, very few people knew that Sam Nunn was not only a point guard for the Perry Panthers (as the ad mentions), but actually an all-state player. That was, it is important to note, before high school sports in Georgia were desegregated, which is why Sam Nunn never became known as the Bill Bradley of Georgia politics (actually, he played JV ball at Georgia Tech before transferring to Emory).

But Michelle’s ad uses the basketball reference to pointedly suggest she did not follow her father into politics, but into a family-and-volunteers career that culminated in her becoming head of “President Bush’s Points of Light Foundation.” So this is a Donkey-free ad on a couple of levels.

As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Daniel Malloy points out, the new ad was introduced by email signed by former Hawks star Dikembe Mutombo.

Her campaign should probably be thinking about recruiting Herschel Walker for the fall home-stretch.